Vigil
by ncfan
Summary: The cell is cold, and quiet, and bare. He's been thinking about her again.


Given that I'm not familiar with any of the _Batman _comics, I'm operating solely on the animated series for the basis of what constitutes canon information. This is set in the interim between _Heart of Ice _and _Deep Freeze. _I hope this seems true to character.

I own nothing.

* * *

_In dreaming there are only two things. There is the summer that existed a thousand years ago, that he will never feel again, so tantalizingly close and yet vanished forever. There is her, smiling and radiating the simple joy of her heart, until it's all turned to rot and she is trapped beneath the glass unto death. In dreaming, he forms the conviction that memory is the tormentor of the mind._

The cell is cold, and quiet, and bare. Nothing with sharp edges, and the walls are all completely smooth—the ceiling looms some ten feet overhead. The only piece of furniture is the bed, a thin little affair close to the ground, and the bed frame has only rounded points. Shoelaces have been replaced by Velcro—even that precaution was taken.

Frankly, he can't help but think that if someone his size was going to try to hang himself with his shoelaces, either the shoelaces wouldn't be long enough to do the job, or they'd snap before they could actually do any appreciable damage. He supposes he could be wrong, but he doesn't think so.

They let him keep the bell jar. He seemed happier with it. Well, maybe not happier. More that he seemed slightly more at peace with his situation if he had something of his to keep him company.

But it's not like peace is something he'll every truly find. Not here. Not anywhere.

He's not sure whether to answer to Freeze or Fries; it all sounds the same, so much so that if the guard says either one in addressing him, he can't really tell the difference. He can't tell the difference, so he just says _"Yes?"_, and looks up, to unnerve everyone he meets with the flat stare of his barely-blinking eyes, and eyelids so translucent that even shading his eyes, the faint outline of iris and pupil can still be made out.

They come, and then they leave, like a mirage on a blustery winter's night, when all is snowbound and the wind makes the eyes play tricks. All is quiet, all is still, and there's nothing at all in the world, except the light shining off of the bell jar and her small, painted plastic form within, and his own thoughts, inevitably journeying into the past.

All the scenes of the past play out like a grainy serial, except it's all too bright, all too colorful, all too _warm_. _Warmth _isn't something he understands anymore. All he can feel is the cold piercing his bones, the vicious cold freezing his blood solid in his veins, until every move is a struggle. _Warmth _seems as far away as she does; there's summer just beyond the walls of his cell, green and bright and so, so _warm_, but he'll never feel it again.

Maybe he stopped understanding when he was cursed with this form. Maybe he stopped understanding when first he saw his Nora beneath the glass, or hooked up to a multitude of tubes and wires in a hospital bed, infected with medicines that make her cough and waste away to nothing, her once rosy cheeks turned to chalk, appearing less a woman and more some much-abused voodoo doll, tormented by her affliction and the one who drives needles in her skin. Maybe even before that.

Images arise, unbidden, in his mind, sensations of sight and sound, things that bring to his barely-beating heart both the height of ecstasy and the abyss of despair.

Her smile. Her laugh. Sunlight off of her hair and teeth. The tunes she'd hum or sing aloud, with a soft, quivering voice like the wind through dry grass outside.

He remembers, too, having lifted her up into his arms once. Nora had been joking, betting he couldn't—he was a big man but that didn't mean he was physically fit—and imagine the look of surprise on her face, lips parting in a small "o", as he proved her wrong. They'd still been dating in those days, just out of college, the both of them, and she wasn't yet really accustomed to that sort of levity out of him. People had always said they were ill-matched in temperament; he'd never thought so.

"_Hey, Victor." _She had been beaming, her thin little arms latched about his neck. He doesn't recall what she said next, but clearly can he remember the little trill of laughter that rose to the sky, sweeter than birdsong and more transient than the shortest-lived mayfly on the face of the earth. He'd been smiling then, laughing with her, but now, it's extraordinary how much it hurts to recall the way her voice sounded when she said his name.

He can dredge up nothing beyond the way the scenes looked and sounded. He can't remember her weight in his arms; oh yes, easy enough to say that it was no mean feat, even if she was a slight woman, but he can't remember what it felt like. Memory of her skin's texture, though he knows in his mind it was smooth, is denied. There's no telling what her hair smelled like, or whether she'd had a sheen of sweat on her skin from the sweltering summer day.

And, though he can see it all too clearly in his mind's eye, the dagger of ice that goes straight past his hard, stiff skin to bury itself in his heart, like the Snow Queen's kiss making a lumpen ball of ice out of Kay's heart, when he calls to mind the memory of a kiss, he can only see it. The pressure of twin pairs of lips, a quick, chaste kiss, is lost, just like her.

All in all, staring in front of the mirrors of memory is like watching a movie. So close, and yet so far. The people are as familiar to him as the walls of his cell, and yet, they are worlds away into a far happier past than what his existence is now. He's so close that he could almost reach out and touch her, but he'll never do that again.

The bell jar is the same: co close, and yet so far. And there is Nora inside the glass, except it's not Nora, will never be Nora, no matter how much he tries to imagine her moving, breathing, living. All that he spies is a plastic figuring whose resemblance to her hurts, and yet is the only balm he has.

But all those images, those running images that hurt and cut and could almost burn if he could remember the warmth necessary for fire, they all shatter eventually. The past shatters as spun glass or fragile ice, and he's left only with a heap of broken images sifting through his hands. No matter how he tries to hold on to it, it only slips away.

Nora is not a happy, smiling creature of the present. Nora is gone, and belongs to the past he'll never find again. Nora had begged, over and over again, for someone, anyone, to make the pain stop. _Please, it hurts so much. I just want it to stop. Please, try to understand, I can't live in this sort of pain. Please, please, try to understand. _He had understood, understood her all too well, but he had promised he would save her and she, she had trusted him, to no good end. They, he and she, had only delayed the inevitable. Without her, trapped in this body of cold, slowly deteriorating agony, he had lived only to make the man who killed her suffer, but even his attempts to avenge her failed, and now here he finds himself, able to do nothing but reflect, and miss her.

The past is gone. The present is nothing but going from day to day. He can't call this "life"; it's barely "existence." And the future?

The future is just a blank. Whatever the future holds, it won't make him want to be there to see it anymore than he does now. All he wants is to be with her, but that is denied him.

He thinks of her, his vanished Nora, the one he failed, again and again and again. He thinks of her, gone into the ether, and unable to forgive him. He thinks of her, and weeps.

He holds the bell jar in his hands. He's been steadily losing feeling in his fingers since the change forced upon him—he'd needed the suit for fine motor control as much as he had for strength and survival—but his fingers can still grasp the jar. He stares at the Nora who is not Nora, and weeps.

Vigils are held in long, winter nights. They are the vigils held for one dead, even long after she is gone, when he can not sleep or simply can not bring himself to try. There is no future, not for him. Only the long winter, the winter that promises death even for him. Life in the cell is not so different from life in the suit—he is cordoned off from all of humanity, and she is nowhere to be found—and he barely notices the difference. It's all the same for him. There's no future, none that he can see.

But sometimes a shadow passes by, fluttering through the window like a lost bird.

And sometimes, he can remember hope.

If there's any hope at all, hope for him, hope for her, hope for them, maybe he'll see a future again.

Somewhere he can feel her hand in his, and the warmth of the world on his skin again.


End file.
